The ‘Nevertheless’ Society

As the threatened escalation of events in Syria seems, at least, to have simmered down, we are left with the Nevertheless Dichotomy.

The United States has apparently backed away, at least in the immediate sense, of its widely blared announcement that the time has come for military intervention in Syria by outside nations — chief among them the U.S. Nevertheless, two million people have fled the country in recent months, creating one of the worst refugee problems the world community has faced in 50 years.

Russia and the U.S. have agreed on a timetable of one week for the government of Syria to identify, and begin the dismantling of, all chemical weapons in its possession by initiating a process of turning over those weapons to international inspection, control, and destruction. Nevertheless, 10 million people inside of Syria are homeless today, thousands have been killed in the two-year old civil war that has plagued the country, and the killing goes on in this very moment.

Leaving the specifics of the Syrian crisis aside for a moment and stepping back to a larger, global picture…we see that we have created around the world a Nevertheless Society.

From the Mind of Humanity has emerged scientific discoveries, medical miracles, and technological achievements creating enhancements in human life both breathtaking and laudible. Nevertheless, nearly 700 children still die every hour on the Earth of starvation, minorities of every identity continue to be persecuted, and our species forever finds it impossible to create a global experience of security, peace, health and prosperity for any but the tiniest percentage of its members.

(Note: This article is Part V of an ongoing series: The Nature of God and Life/an exploration of critical importance in our time.)

Our lives are today filled with modern “conveniences.” Nevertheless, for many people life has been emptied of higher meaning, grander purpose, and richer experience. And those “conveniences” — such as the ubiquitous cell phone, the ever-present laptop, the smartwatch, and now even Google glasses — have all made life more inconvenient, robbing us of what little peace and quiet and “down time” we had left. Our private moments are shrinking, even as our public persona is becoming more vacuous.

We are told that we are moving forward, forward, ever forward in our evolutionary process. Nevertheless, our path seems to be taking us backward, to a Might is Right moral code, to an Every Man for Himself reality, to a Kill or Be Killed consciousness.

This is remarkable for a species that tells itself that it has reached its highest level of awareness ever. It leads every thinking person to ask: Is it possible that there is something we don’t fully understand about Life, the understanding of which could change everything?

There are some who have said that sadness and suffering are natural conditions of the human experience. Yet my understanding is that sadness and suffering are not conditions, they are consequences. And consequences of what? They are consequences of our thinking.

Thinking is the tool that Life (read that, God) has given us with which to deal with events and circumstances, situations and occurrences in our daily experience upon the earth. Yet why do events and circumstances, situations and occurrences that produce sadness and suffering even have to arise?

The answer is circular. Thinking is the tool given to us to deal with events and circumstances, and thinking is the creative force that generates them.

Life will be experienced by each of us in the way that we think about its events—and the way that we think about its events collectively creates those events themselves.

That includes the crisis in Syria, the hundreds of dying children each day, and every other aspect of life — both good and bad — that we encounter and experience in the physical world.

How and why this is true…next in this series.

There is a way we can bring an end to the Nevertheless Society. That is what this series of articles is all about.